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Kunming, Yunnan Province, China - The
haze of a hundred cigarettes hovers over this jam-packed saloon of vaguely Anglo-American-nautical
theme. A series of bands, some live, some karaoke, bangs out a mix of killer
hard rock and the ubiquitous sappy Japanese-redux-style
Roger Williams whiner Muzak. Rock-n-roll, not
whiner-music, is clearly the favorite in Kunming.
On the dance floor there is a beer-can
stacking contest, four feet high seeming to be the theoretical limit, wild
hoots and applause if the theoretical altitude is exceeded; the hookers are
chugging Heineken on dares twixt one another, chasing their beers with wine;
you can save money if you order rounds of Heineken or Dali bottles, or Tingtsao cans, by the case for your table; a game of
Liar's Dice is under way; a gold miner with fine property in Henan Province
is being hustled by (yet another) Canadian major - his property package went
beggaring a year ago for $2 million, now a world-famous gold miner has just
paid $10 million for some of it and he gets to keep the best part; the miner
orders another round and introduces the hookers as his new wives, “Which
one is the prettiest?” he asks; in addition to the “working
girls” the fabulously groomed female office workers and engineers of
Kunming wait patiently at their own tables - if you like one of them you fill
out a ticket identifying your table and inviting them over, and give it to
the barkeep, if she likes you she'll drop by, the sociology of a law where
Chinese parents are allowed only one son, but daughters were looked at the
other way; all seem to marvel at the ponderous belly of the wide-eyed
bewildered round-eye in their midst.
The deep waters of Dianchi
Lake lap placidly on nearby shores. This 2,400-year-old city of 1 million
folks descended from 26 ethnic minorities is ablaze in neon, and rockin' on this typical Monday night. Close your eyes to
the neon, tune out the electronic music, just listen instead to the
triumphant boisterous chatter, and you could be in Wallace, Idaho in 1890,
Comstock, Nev. in 1847, San Francisco in 1850, or the Klondike or Dawson or
Seattle of 1898. There's gold and silver in them there hills! Forget the
TSX-V-censored press releases, with their cautions and warnings. China knows
that, after 200 years in the hole, they're hot, expletives un-deleted and
hyperbole all in.
Technology, silk, gunpowder, spaghetti,
ceramics and tea are what China offered the West, and for millennia the
Persians, the Romans, the Italians, the Russians and the Brits bore silver
over the Silk Road and the oceans to procure them. To stand on these streets
is to tread on the cobblestones trod by Alexander the Great, by Caesar's
Legions, by Marco Polo. China's love-affair with silver as money pre-dates
recorded time, but was well-established before the birth of Christ. By 475
B.C. silver was informally monetized by China as a rational and unimpeachable
means of exchange. The Yuan Dynasty of 1279-1369 A.D. declared silver to be
China's official money, a tradition followed by the ensuing Ming and Qing
dynasties - indeed the tradition of silver money continued uncontaminated
until 1935, when the Middle Kingdom became the last civilized culture on the
planet to succumb to paper money.
Demand from both sides of the Urals and
oceans for China's advanced technologies and precious commodities over the
four decades between 1400 and 1800 A.D. was so intense that by 1800, China
possessed at least half of the world's silver in European, Asian and even
American denominations.
The non-Chinese world howled. Savvy
Brits, unable to make their tea, silk and ceramic purchases from China with
silver that Her Majesty's treasuries no longer contained, did what any great
superpower would do: they looted more silver from elsewhere, mainly the New
World, and they inveighed war and enslavement
against China. Being civilized, the Brits tried enslavement first, shipping tonne upon tonne of
Indian-grown opium to China in exchange for tea and silver. Not to be
out-done the Yanks jumped in, and the great clipper ship merchant fleets were
born. Yes, the homeward-bound clipper ships hauled tea, but they weren't
running dead-head to China: their east-bound holds teemed with dope.
Other than silver, dope was the only
thing the Western world had left to trade. China and India possessed most of
the prevailing technologies and had all the access they needed to natural
resources in their provinces; all the West had to offer this new global
economy were dope and an advanced military culture.
Its money and its youth threatened, an
infuriated China outlawed opium in the early 1800s, first to preserve the
mental health of its people, second to preserve the integrity of its silver
treasuries, which by 1500 A.D. had made Asia the major player in what was
then arguably the first fully integrated global economy. But mercantilist
China, used to thriving on peaceful trade and innovation rather than war and
conquest, was at a total loss to confront the Royal Navy, which sailed and
later steamed to Chinese ports escorting boatloads of British merchantmen
larded with the dreaded drug.
By the 1830s, writes historian Richard
Hooker: “(T)he English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal
organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can
even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of
criminality. Growing opium in India, the East India Company shipped tons
of opium into Canton which it traded for Chinese manufactured goods and for
tea. This trade had produced, quite literally, a country filled with drug
addicts, as opium parlors proliferated all throughout China in the early part
of the nineteenth century. This trafficking, it should be stressed, was a
criminal activity after 1836, but the British traders generously bribed
Canton officials in order to keep the opium traffic flowing. The effects on
Chinese society were devastating. In fact, there are few periods in Chinese
history that approach the early nineteenth century in terms of pure human
misery and tragedy. In an effort to stem the tragedy, the imperial government
made opium illegal in 1836 and began to aggressively close down the opium
dens.”
Fault the frustrated Chinese government
for actually starting the Opium Wars, if you must. To enforce its prohibition
(and its sovereignty) China sent a rag-tag fleet of junks out to intercept a
British opium shipment in November 1839. Though the junks were hopelessly outgunned,
an indignant England dispatched the Royal Navy to exact revenge. For two
years the Royal Navy mercilessly hammered China's shore batteries, ultimately
prevailing. (The Chinese, it seems, did not embrace Klausewitz's
philosophy that war is merely an extension of politics. They naively believed
that reason and technology would trump all else.)
Humiliated by this defeat, China signed
the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, followed a year later by the British
Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue. These provided that
the ports of Guangzhou, Jinmen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai should be open
to British opium trade and British residence; in addition Hong Kong was ceded
to the British. Sensing blood France, Russia and the United States all piled
in with similar treaties granting similar access. In essence, the West
subdivided the Middle Kingdom.
A sort of 19th Century prototype of the
Treaty of Versailles, the Nanking Treaty also called for the scalp of Lin Tse-hsü, the Imperial Commissioner at Canton - he
was the author of China's anti-opium policy - and the poor guy was dishonoured and fell on his sword. Maggie Thatcher's
return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty wasn't an act of surrender at all;
it was merely the return of stolen goods, maybe even an imperial act of
contrition, a rare event in this nasty age.
To drive a freeway in Beijing is to
discover the Brits' all-told influence in China. What we would call the
truckers' lane is the “Carriage-Way.” To visit the Forbidden
City, the Summer Palace, is to hearken upon gut-wrenching tales of ancient
places of prayer and worship sacked and burned by the British and the French.
Delightfully transliterated informational signs invariably use British
spellings.
The contemporary American historian
Andre Gunter Frank, in his seminal book Re-Orient argues passionately for a
re-thinking of our Eurocentric, Marxist view toward China, and the rotten
things we've done to Asia because we could not trump their technologies.
Follow the trade, not the bullets, Frank begs.
Think about it, please? When was the
last time China invaded Mexico or Canada? To China, Mexico is as close as
Viet Nam. Korea is as close as Canada. How do we look to them?
And what of our embrace of Japan, which,
after the Brits were done with China, savaged what was
left with a brutality in the 1930s and 1940s that makes Stalin, Hitler and
even Mao look like absolute pikers? Japan was far less user-friendly to
Americans than China ever has been. I am not making this up. Ask anyone doing
trade in both countries. You can own fee-simple property, as an American, in
China. You cannot do so in Japan.
At a banquet and drinking party in Lijiang, China, another stop along the Silk Road, 9,000
feet above sea level at the foot of the 18,000-foot Jade Dragon Snow
Mountain, I am seated next to a Taiwanese businessman who buys silver powder
from China, converts it into semiconductors, and sells it back into the
mainland. What is to become of you guys? I ask during one of our interminable
China-style toasts. What is to become of Taiwan? Are you in danger from these
people?
“Shee-yut,”
he replies in his best American slang. “We need them. They need us.
That's friendly. I have many customers here. They have many customers in
Taiwan. We do business, not war. You want my advice? Keep an eye on
Japan.”
Thus goes the talk, from the sea-level
elevations of Beijing to the high-mountain wilds of Lijiang.
Trade, not dreadnaughts, as the tools of diplomacy. Interesting stuff,
considering that two Chinese astronauts have been returned safely to earth
even as Brownspan and Rumsfeld are here, trying to
bring the Chinese to Jesus - all in the past week.
Earlier this trip, with Zhu Lin Xian,
the Magistrate of Louning County, Henan Province,
we toast our complicated teenage daughters and the future of silver mining in
China. No horse--- about international relations; we have just decided we are
friends. He has graciously hosted lunch. Our company giggles politely, but
not derisively, at the round-eye's ineptness with chopsticks. We swap packs
of cigarettes; mine, American Spirits, his Luo Yan
and locally made. He likes mine so much he fetches up his chauffeur to trade
a carton for a pack. Smoking Luo Yans this week, I clearly got the better end of the deal.
Zhu's smokes are good. A carton of decent ciggies
in China sells for about a buck. Yes, wages here suck, a miner earns 1,000
RMB (about $100 US) a month, but he can buy a Bic
lighter or a pack of Luo Yans
for a dime, and have enough left over to make the strokes on his farm.
Despite the need for an interpreter the
conversation flows easily. Xian is a guy you'd like instantly, meeting over a
pool game. He was a school teacher, now a high-ranking official who can cut
you a mining deal and wants only an amenable (1 percent, entirely reasonable)
tax cut for his county in return for a decent 30-year mine lease. If he signs
off, so does the central government. You don't have to “think
Chinese” to like Mr. Zhu, or to appreciate the
time he has carved from a busy day managing a county of 800,000 people to break
bread. China wants, and except for a few brief bad moments, embraces
capitalism. Let's get rich, he says. His message to this American, only one
of which has ever visited this region before: Please come see us, and meet
us. We like you guys; please come see us, because I think you will like us,
too.
So I raise my Heineken or Dali high to
the celebrating silver miners in Kunming who are stacking beer cans and
expending American capital in their efforts, and are
sharing, as per contract, the fruits. You can cut a 75-25 percent deal here
if you are a bright Canadian miner, not bad, better than the 50-50
Schlumberger just got for a chemical plant in Beijing.
I toast the gutsy China Man who has left
the farm, bet his equity on a ferryboat, to haul mining concentrates from the
Ying Mine down the reservoir to the mill on a contract, or to drive his truck
on the high-line.
I toast the upstart North American
companies who are willing to take a chance on China, even as I toast a China
willing to take a chance on us. The British cannon are gone. China's great
test will be to see if it can keep these deals. So will be America's.
China is back, and in the long
perspective of history, they've not been gone long. Which means silver is
back. Which means honest money is back. Which means astuteness in trade, not
violence, has a chance to determine the future of the human race. Which
means, maybe even within the lifetime of my own daughters, and the daughters
of Zhu Lin Xian, an honest America will return. The Pacific will have earned
her name.
The News-Press website is not
really set up for a web dialogue but you can email me at: 999silver@gmail.com if you have a comment, suggestion, or your own personal rant.
Please, no spam. Had it for lunch.
Editor’s note: The following column was originally written in
2005.
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